SAP Allies with CA Technologies on GRC

One of the unfortunate challenges associated with any modern business in the enterprise today is that the tools that we use to manage IT and the software we use to track compliance are not particularly well integrated.

SAP and CA Technologies today announced an extension of their existing alliance through which both companies are pledging to work together to finally solve this problem.

According to Thomas McHale, vice president for product management for CA Technologies, system events detected by systems management software from CA Technologies will be able to pass information in a native format to SAP governance tools via an application programming interface (API) that the two companies have developed.

While the arrangement is not exclusive, David Milam, vice president of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions for SAP, said that because of the API work between the two companies, the GRC relationship with CA Technologies is especially close for SAP.

As GRC has developed over the years, a significant gap has emerged between the tools used to manage GRC and the daily events that take place inside any given IT department. McHale said the CA Technologies software will now be able to interpret IT events in way that identifies significant GRC events and then pass that information over to SAP.

Given the fact that compliance is all about monitoring business events, and that there can be no significant business event that doesn't involve IT, the integration of systems management tools and GRC software is long overdue.

The good news is that progress is finally being made in tightly coupling the systems management tools that underlie our IT infrastructure and the tools we use to manage GRC.